Never strong, Sterne broke down in Janu ary 1762, and hurried across the channel. After a brief stay in Paris, where statesmen, philoso phers and the world of fashion crowded about him, he moved south to Toulouse, where he was joined by wife and daughter. He remained in southern France till the summer of 1764, when he returned alone to Coxwold. His health failing again, he set out for France in October 1765 on his famous sentimental journey. He traveled mostly by chaise from Calais via Montreuil to Paris, on to the south through Languedoc and then crossing over into Italy on to Rome and Naples. He was back at Coxwold in the summer of 1766. All this time his wife and daughter remained abroad. While in Lon don for the winter of 1766-67, Sterne met and fell in love with Mrs. Elizabeth Draper, wife to a writer in the service of the East India Company. She sailed for India in April 1767 and poor Yorick was left broken-hearted. Mrs. Draper is the Eliza of the 'Sentimental Jour ney' and of a series of letters. After her de parture for India, Sterne had a serious illness from which he barely recovered. In June he returned to Coxwold, where he recorded his sensations from day to day in a journal he kept for Eliza, and began 'A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy.' In the following January he went up to London with the new book, which was published on 26 Feb. 1768. He soon took to his bed and died 18 March 1768 at his lodgings in Old Bond street. At the time he was alone save for a nurse and a foot man whom friends had sent to inquire after him. Four days later he was buried in Saint George's cemetery on the Bayswater road. Ac cording to a story which is probably true, his body was taken up and sold for dissection to the professors of anatomy at Cambridge. The
next year Mrs. Sterne swept his study for three more volumes of sermons; and in 1775, Lydia, then Mrs. Medalle, brought out her father's let ters and brief autobiography.
Stern's career appeals strongly to the imagi nation. An obscure country parson till his 47th, Europe. he at once becaMe known throughout rn westeurope. Everybody wished to see the man who had written 'Tristram Shandy.) In London and in Paris there always awaited him °dinners a fortnight deep?) A letter addressed to °Mr. Tristram Shandy, Europe," was handed him by the postboy on the way to Sutton. When Lessing heard of Yorick's death, he said that he would gladly have given him five years from his own life. See SENTIMENTAL. JOURNEY, A; and TRISTRAM SHANDY.
In 1780, Sterne's original publishers issued his work in 10 volumes. Of the numerous reprints, the best is the one edited by J. P. Brown (London 1873). It includes some additional letters. The convenient edition by Saintshury (6 vols., London 1894) omits most of the sermons. The 'Works and Life) (12 vols., New York 1904), edited by Cross, contains the recently recovered 'Journal to Eliza,' additions to the correspondence, Mrs.
Draper's letters to friends in England, a body of anecdotes, and the 'Life' (annotated) by Fitzgerald. This standard biography by Fitz gerald, published in 1864, was revised in 1896 and reprinted in 1905. Consult also Traill's 'Laurence Sterne) in (English Men of Letters Series' (London and New York 1882); Stap fer's Sterne, sa personne at ses ouvrages> (Paris 1870), and Thackeray's 'Eng lish Humorists.' Of more special interest are Texte's 'Rousseau et le cosmopolitisme lit terarie au XVIII eme siecle) (Paris 1895), and Thayer's (Laurence Sterne in Germany,' with a biliography (New York 1905).